The Invisible Black Man
The story of Dr. Mark Dean by Tyrone D. Taborn

"America's High Tech "Invisible Man" By Tyrone D. Taborn
You may not have heard of Dr. Mark Dean. And you aren't alone. But almost
everything in your life has been affected by his work.
See, Dr. Mark Dean is a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is in the National
Hall of Inventors. He has more than 30 patents pending. He is a vice
president with IBM. Oh, yeah. And he is also the architect of the modern-day
personal computer. Dr. Dean holds three of the original nine patents on the
computer that all PCs are based upon. And, Dr. Mark Dean is an African
American.

So how is it that we can celebrate the 20th anniversary of the IBM personal
computer without reading or hearing a single word about him? Given all of the
pressure mass media are under about negative portrayals of African Americans
on television and in print, you would think it would be a slam dunk to
highlight someone like Dr. Dean.

Somehow, though, we have managed to miss the shot. History is cruel when it
comes to telling the stories of African Americans. Dr. Dean isn't the first
Black inventor to be overlooked. Consider John Stanard, inventor of the
refrigerator, George Sampson, creator of the clothes dryer, Alexander Miles
and his elevator, Lewis Latimer and the electric lamp. All of these inventors
share two things: One, they changed the landscape of our society; and, two,
society relegated them to the footnotes of history. Hopefully, Dr. Mark Dean
won't go away as quietly as they did. He certainly shouldn't. Dr. Dean helped
start a Digital Revolution that created people like Microsoft's Bill Gates
and Dell Computer's Michael Dell. Millions of jobs in information technology
can be traced back directly to Dr. Dean.

More important, stories like Dr. Mark Dean's should serve as inspiration for
African-American children. Already victims of the "Digital Divide" and
failing school systems, young, Black kids might embrace technology with more
enthusiasm if they knew someone like Dr. Dean already was leading the way.
Although technically Dr. Dean can't be credited with creating the computer --
that is left to Alan Turing, a pioneering 20th-century English mathematician
widely considered being the father of modern computer science -- Dr. Dean
rightly deserves to take a bow for the machine we use today. The computer
really wasn't practical for home or small business use until he came along,
leading a team that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus)
that enables multiple devices, such as modems and printers, to be connected
to personal computers.

In other words, because of Dr. Dean n, the PC became a part of our daily
lives. For most of us, changing the face of society would have been enough.
But not for Dr. Dean. Still in his early forties, he has a lot of inventing
left in him.

He recently made history again by leading the design team responsible for
creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip. It's just another huge step in
making computers faster and smaller. As the world congratulates itself for
the new Digital Age brought on by the personal computer, we need to guarantee
that the African-American story is part of the hoopla surrounding the most
stunning technological advance the world has ever seen. We cannot afford to
let Dr. Mark Dean become a footnote in history. He is well worth his own
history book.
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